Kimbo Slice

Kimbo Slice during a fight in Las Vegas in 2009.Credit
Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images

The Lives They Lived

In the online video that started Kimbo Slice on his way to bare-knuckle fame in 2003, two heavily muscled black men, each smooth-headed and stripped to the waist, square off in a backyard in Florida. Behind them you can see a grill, a satellite dish, palm trees. The web address of a porn site appears on the screen. Kimbo lowers his guard and taunts his opponent, Big D, who strikes Kimbo’s heedlessly exposed chin with no visible effect. Kimbo lands a blow that drops Big D to all fours in the sere grass. Staggering to his feet, Big D holds out open hands in a pacific gesture and says, “Chill, dawg, just chill.”

If Kimbo Slice had been born a few years earlier, he would have been just another knockaround guy, but the technological moment allowed him to become something new: a viral sports star. Bypassing the traditional stages of craft apprenticeship and the institutional middlemen who control the development of athletic talent, he used online video to take his fearsome persona directly to the public. He was a cartoon of aggression, nine parts Mr. T to one part Mike Tyson, with a comic-book character’s massive chest and steroidal ziggurat of shoulder and neck muscle, a refulgent Old Testament beard and dialogue consisting of mighty gold-toothed roars and tag lines on the order of “game over.” If his heart had not given out at age 42, he would have found a lasting home in professional wrestling and Hollywood, where the violence is pure mime.

Before Kevin Ferguson became Kimbo Slice — Kimbo was an old nickname; Slice derived from a gruesome cut he inflicted on Big D — he was a star linebacker at Miami Palmetto Senior High School and, after college football didn’t work out, drifted into work as a bouncer. While minding the door of a strip club one night, he ran into Mike (Icey) Imber, a high school friend who had become an entrepreneur in the growing online porn business. They hit upon the idea of matching Kimbo against local tough guys who had backers willing to bet on informal scraps. “The world we were in, it was easier to go for immediate satisfaction,” Imber says. “As a regular boxer, you have to start from the bottom, and it can take years to get up to 10 grand, if you ever do. This way, we ask around, find a badass in Liberty City or South Miami, put up the money, it’s on.”

Imber uploaded the video of the fight with Big D to one of his porn sites, and it later blew up on YouTube. Other bouts followed in parking lots and driveways, with Kimbo taking on Afropuff, Bic Mac, Dreads, the Bouncer, Adryan. Drawn by the bigger money available in more legitimate fighting circles, he started training in Mixed Martial Arts, making his debut in the cage in 2007. Having become a headline attraction while still an M.M.A. novice, Kimbo soon moved on to six-figure paydays. He appeared on reality TV (“The Ulimate Fighter”) and in action movies (“Blood and Bone,” “The Scorpion King 3”) and played a prison lout named Bludge in Nickelodeon’s “Merry Christmas, Drake & Josh.” Mike Tyson, Shaquille O’Neal and various rappers professed admiration. Kimbo’s celebrity and money kept multiplying, and eventually he barely had to do any real fighting.

Every once in a while, though, Kimbo ran into a competent opponent. The YouTube archive that constitutes his truest legacy offers reminders that you skip apprenticeship at your peril. In one much-viewed 10-minute street fight, Kimbo and a Boston cop named Sean Gannon, both utterly exhausted, lean on each other like mating lizards until Gannon finally finishes Kimbo with dreamy-slow clubbing blows.

Kimbo’s best-known M.M.A. loss came at the hands of Seth Petruzelli, a last-minute substitute who looked across at Kimbo just before the opening bell and found little to worry about. “Anyone I see who’s a musclehead, lifts a lot of weights, I think this guy’s not going to last 30 seconds, not going to have any moves, sloppy technique,” says Petruzelli — at best a journeyman, but one who had been training in martial arts since he was 7. Seeing Kimbo’s beard sticking up when he charged in, a sign that his chin was not properly tucked, Petruzelli responded with practiced reflex, nailing the exposed chin with a concise right and then raining blows on Kimbo as he lay stunned on the canvas. The bout lasted 14 seconds.

Exploiting the freer access to a mass public made possible by digital technology, Kimbo Slice was one of the many D.I.Y. democratizers who have challenged professional experts’ control of the apparatus of celebrity. He was no Achilles; rather, he stands for all those fleetingly noted or entirely nameless Trojan warriors slain in droves by the godlike hero in his battle rages. For every genuine nonpareil there’s an army of guys like Kimbo who do what they can with what they’ve got, angling to catch a break from the fates.

Carlo Rotella is the director of American studies at Boston College and the author, most recently, of “Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles and Other True Stories.”

B. 1938

Janet Reno

What you learn when you ride shotgun with the former attorney general.

By
MICHAEL PATERNITI

Janet (right) and her sister, Maggy, circa 1948, at their childhood home.Credit
From Maggy Hurchalla.

Central Florida is the in-between you make go away by pressing a little harder on the gas. Orange groves at dusk, sky full of pastel color, and Janet Reno is driving the car, a rental. It’s 2002, Reno is running for governor of Florida, and I’ve spent days riding shotgun with her, reporting for this magazine, accompanying her to various campaign events — most of them populated by older women, bright and warm women with structures of freshly coifed hair, who fawn over Janet Reno, who knew her mother, an investigative reporter for The Miami News. To them, Janet Reno is the daughter who left Florida to fix America, serving eight controversial years as attorney general under Bill Clinton, and has now returned to fix the Sunshine State.

Edgar Mitchell

There is a photograph of the astronaut Edgar Mitchell emerging from the Apollo 14 capsule, a ragged cone of scorched metal and shredded foil bobbing in the South Pacific 880 miles off the coast of American Samoa. A wetsuit-clad Navy swimmer is helping him out of the access hatch and into an inflatable raft. Mitchell, dressed in an olive-drab flight suit and a biological mask, steadies himself with his left hand on the door frame. He is 40, with the receding hairline and blandly gentle affect of a family dentist. It is Feb. 9, 1971, and he has just had an epiphany.

Miss Cleo

Late at night, she offered advice to the anxious and the lovelorn.

By
JENNA WORTHAM

Miss Cleo during a tarot reading at her Florida home in 2012.Credit
Tony Shaff

You had to have a little bit of patience and a lot of luck to catch Miss Cleo. She appeared on TV only late at night, after the second round of reruns and right before the white fuzz took over the screen. Miss Cleo was usually sitting at a table, draped in a glorious amount of fabrics, a stack of tarot cards in front of her, candles and incense burning behind her. “You have questions, I have the answers,” she would intone knowingly in her Jamaican patois, before singing out the words that would become her signature catchphrase: “Call me now!”

David Bowie

Extracts from an endless list of reasons to appreciate an endlessly restless artist.

By
COLSON WHITEHEAD

David Bowie, 1976Credit
Snowdon/Trunk Archive

... and it is a collaboration that makes me additionally thankful for this splendid enigma: What did you and Eno chat about in between takes? Your favorite Hammer films? Is a hot dog a sandwich, yes or no?

Jack T. Chick

He drew inspiration from a painting he kept on display in his studio, a depiction of souls plummeting into hell — a constant reminder of the multitudes that even his pen, wielded by a cartoonist for Christ, could not save from eternal fire. Still, Jack T. Chick did what he could, illustrating and mass-marketing his palm-size booklets that told different stories with the same message: If you do not accept Jesus Christ as your savior, you are hellbound.

Pedals the Bear

By walking on two legs, he made us rethink the divide between human and animal.

By
JON MOOALLEM

Pedals in Oak Ridge, N.J.Credit
Still from a video by Joe Esposito

In 2003, the State of New Jersey allowed a black-bear hunt for the first time in 33 years. The resulting controversy, still smoldering today, seemed irresolvable: Depending on whom you asked, the hunt was either sadistic blood sport or noble tradition. Two sociologists, Dave Harker and Diane C. Bates, scrutinized 10 years of clashing regional newspaper editorials and letters to the editor and concluded that the two sides did not even seem to be arguing about the same animal. Actual bears had been replaced by “competing social constructions” of bears. Those in favor of the hunt imagined the animals as “menacing threats” that needed to be controlled; those against saw them as docile and benevolent creatures that just wanted to “live in peace.”

William A. Del Monte

What do we lose when the final survivor of a mass disaster dies?

By
JON GERTNER

San Francisco after the earthquake in 1906.Credit
George R. Lawrence, via the Library of Congress

When the shaking stopped on April 18, 1906, William A. Del Monte’s mother bundled him in a tablecloth and carried him out of the house and into the street, where her husband waited in a buckboard wagon. Amid San Francisco’s chaos — broken water and gas mains, shattered windows, twisted telegraph wires, six-foot chasms in the fissured earth — a horse began hauling the family from their North Beach neighborhood to the ferry terminal by the Embarcadero. Dawn was breaking. Small fires were beginning to burn. Houses, tipped diagonally, seemed on the verge of collapse. The city’s power was down, and its supplies of fresh water were mostly gone.

Frank Sinatra Jr. & Ricci Martin

The Martin and Sinatra families on the set of ‘‘The Dean Martin Show’’ in 1967. Frank Sinatra Jr. is at the top left, and Ricci Martin is at the bottom left.Credit
Bettmann/Getty Images

In 1963, the 19-year-old Frank Sinatra Jr. sang with the Tommy Dorsey band, just as his father had two decades before, though now Dorsey was seven years dead and The New York Times referred to the musicians performing under his name as a “ghost band that has become the nucleus of a ghost show.” The younger Sinatra was praised for how close his mannerisms and phrasing were to his father’s, but he was damned for lacking his father’s “creative presence.”

Natalie Cole

Every time she hit it big, something knocked her down.

By
ROB HOERBURGER

Natalie Cole, 1976Credit
David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty Images

The song came gushing out like an open hydrant on a hot summer day, but for Natalie Cole, it was a complicated kind of high. Minutes before she heard her breakthrough hit, “This Will Be,” on the radio for the first time in 1975, she had scored a heroin fix and was tripping down 113th Street in Harlem. Drugs were a recent mainstay; she started using heavily in college, during the substance-fueled psychedelic era (she still managed to get her degree, in psychology). Music, meanwhile, was her birthright — after all, she was the daughter of Nat King Cole, one of the most beloved singers of the 20th century. Growing up in the exclusive Hancock Park section of Los Angeles, she could wander into the living room and find the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Sinatra gathered round the family piano. Now that she had a big hit of her own, fame was proving to be a stronger stimulant. She kicked heroin, married one of her producers, had a son, had more hits, appeared on “The Tonight Show.”

Zerka Moreno

She had little doubt that acting out experiences and feelings could save people — and help with child-raising.

By
BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS

Zerka Moreno with her son, Jonathan, in Beacon, N.Y., in July 1955.Credit
From Regina Moreno

When Zerka Moreno gave birth to her son, Jonathan, in 1952, she saw his arrival as a “golden opportunity.” How much more fun and creative might his life be, she wondered, if he were raised using therapeutic techniques like role-playing or talking to an empty chair? Each was pioneered by J.L. Moreno, Zerka’s husband and the founder of psychodrama, a form of therapy in which people act out their experiences and feelings in an effort to gain insight or achieve catharsis.

Antonin Scalia

He claimed objectivity when it came to originalism, but he was a skeptic about science.

By
EMILY BAZELON

Antonin Scalia, 2013Credit
Platon/Trunk Archive

In 1981, the Louisiana Legislature passed a law that forbade public schools to teach evolution without also instructing students on “creation science.” The Creationism Act was challenged in court for breaching the constitutional wall between church and state, in a case that reached the Supreme Court in 1986. For seven justices, the decision involved a simple constitutional question. They saw the law as an effort to force religious belief into the science curriculum, and they struck it down.

Quiet Places

After the deaths of these 10 notable people, The New York Times photographed their private spaces — as they left them.

Photographs by
MITCH EPSTEIN

B. 1938 JANET RENO

Reno’s mother began building the family home, near the Florida Everglades, in 1949, long before Miami’s suburban sprawl crept into the area. Reno moved here at age 14, and — apart from stints in Tallahassee and as U.S. Attorney General — lived here for the rest of her life. The bed and other antiques once belonged to her maternal grandparents. ‘‘I don’t know how old they are,’’ says her sister, Maggy Hurchalla, ‘‘but I’ve known them for as long as I remember, and I just turned 76.’’

Credit
Mitch Epstein for The New York Times

Across the length of 2016, the photographer Mitch Epstein — known for making careful large-format images that draw rich meaning out of places and objects — arranged to visit the living and working spaces of some of the monumental figures we lost this year. The goal was to arrive not long after each person’s death, in those days when a person’s spirit can still seem palpable somewhere among their rooms and their things — as in his photograph of the writer Jim Harrison’s studio, where the items on a bedside table seem as if they were set down only moments ago.

Josephine Del Deo

One day in the summer of 1953, Josephine Couch went with her boyfriend, Salvatore Del Deo, on an overnight trip to the dunes outside Provincetown. They’d been invited by a friend, a former chorus girl who went by Frenchie Chanel, to stay with her at her tar-paper shack by the water. That day, amid the compass grass and rose hips, Josephine, 27, felt the rest of the world vanish: Birds cried, but the white noise of surf and wind enforced a hush. At night, the moonlight caused the dunes to glow. Josephine fell asleep in the arms of Salvatore, whom she married that fall, to the cooing of a dove.

Ruth Hubbard

She was grateful simply to be a female biologist — until she got mad about needing to be grateful.

By
SARA CORBETT

Ruth Hubbard (left), then a research associate and lecturer in biology, with a student at Radcliffe College in the 1970s.Credit
Starr Ockenga, via the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

She was lucky, she believed, to be taught by “Harvard’s great men.” At 17, Ruth Hoffman was freshly enrolled at Radcliffe, the women’s college affiliated with Harvard, and keen on studying biochemistry. It was 1941. The two institutions had separate campuses but shared a faculty. Harvard professors lectured their male students and were then obliged to repeat it all to the smaller, all-female classes at Radcliffe. That teaching women was a chore, even an insult, was something Hoffman read on their faces. Her professors did little, she felt, to hide their disdain.

Prince

His talent — and his persona — may have been heaven-sent.

By
JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

Prince, 1977Credit
Robert Whitman

Famous and influential musicians die every year, but 2016 was bewildering. David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Leon Russell, Phife Dawg ... it’s as if we walked out to look at the stars and found major constellations gone. Who had even gotten over Lou Reed yet?

Afeni Shakur

Long after her son was killed, she became a source of comfort for other grieving mothers.

By
JAZMINE HUGHES

Afeni Shakur in 2003.Credit
Jonathan Mannion

On the second day of the first Circle of Mothers retreat, in 2014, Afeni Shakur approached the stage to speak to the assembled crowd. Some days, it felt as if America was brimming with grieving mothers, so the event’s founder, Sybrina Fulton, wanted to gather many of them together in the hope that they could help one another move forward. Her son, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed two years earlier. Shakur’s son, the rapper Tupac Shakur, had been dead for almost 20 years.

Katherine Dunn

She couldn’t have guessed how passionately misfits would embrace ‘‘Geek Love.’’

By
CAITLIN ROPER

Katherine Dunn in Portland, Ore., in 1995.Credit
Arturo Patten/IMEC

Carnival proprietors taking drugs and poisons to intentionally breed baby freaks: That’s the unvarnished core of Katherine Dunn’s third novel, 1989’s “Geek Love.” The Binewski Carnival Fabulon needs a boost, and Aloysius and Crystal Lil Binewski hatch this twisted plan to turn things around. Lil births a boy with flippers, beautiful Siamese-twin sisters joined at the waist, an albino dwarf hunchback and a boy with telekinetic powers. It hardly sounds like a universal cipher, the kind of humanist tale that attracts readers over time. Yet somehow this strange, singular book has spent the 27 years since its publication doing just that, speaking clear and true to a certain kind of reader.

Alisa Bellettini

The outsider whose “House of Style” brought high fashion to a generation of clueless teenagers.

By
WESLEY MORRIS

Alisa Bellettini at work in Tokyo, 1990.Credit
Dave Sirulnick

The year 1989 was a good time to be 13 and have your MTV. The channel gave you the recipes for being chicer, more alternative, more you; for being gayer, blacker, more confrontational; for being cooler, basically. Perhaps it was your meal plan: “Yo! MTV Raps” for breakfast, “120 Minutes” for a midnight snack. And for dessert, “House of Style.”

Dana Raphael

Investigating why American women did — and did not — breast-feed.

By
MAGGIE JONES

Dana Raphael nursing one of her sons in the mid-1950s.Credit
From the family of Dana Raphael

On the 7:02 a.m. commuter train from Fairfield, Conn., to Manhattan, a woman with scarlet lipstick and chestnut hair slid beside a businessman reading his newspaper. “May I ask you a question?” she said. “What do you think about breast-feeding?” This was the mid-1950s. The woman was Dana Raphael, an anthropologist, a protégée of Margaret Mead and an outspoken feminist who, a decade before Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” refused to take her husband’s name and shunned the conventional wedding her mother planned. She initially also had no intention of following the de rigueur practice of bottle feeding. But after she tried but mostly failed to nurse her firstborn son, she began an anthropological quest that would end up spanning decades: Why was breast-feeding more successful in some cultures than in others?

Muhammad Ali

There’s a story about Muhammad Ali that might have been lost to history, disappearing among all the other Ali esoterica, but for The Los Angeles Times photographer Boris Yaro. On Monday, Jan. 19, 1981, Yaro heard reports of a suicidal jumper on the radio. His editor wasn’t interested, but Yaro drove over to Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile regardless, where he found a young black man in flared jeans and a hoodie, perched on an office-building fire escape nine floors above.

Gwen Ifill

She was an inspiration to female journalists, even middle schoolers.

By
SARA MOSLE

Gwen Ifill as a Times correspondent in the early 1990s.Credit
The New York Times

Role models often appear with a thunderclap, a bright flash on a dark horizon, but can feel remote and evaporate just as quickly. Gwen Ifill was different. I didn’t know her, but I did get to know her influence, how it entered the lives of my students, especially girls and young women of color, whom I taught in Newark, N.J. For those like Jephtane Sophie Sabin and Isabel Evans, who watched Ifill on PBS over many years and eventually had the opportunity to meet her, Ifill created a warm and welcoming climate in which their aspirations had the chance to take root. Her impact wasn’t instant but played out slowly over time, like the rain of a wet season.

Jacques Rivette & Abbas Kiarostami

Born years (and worlds) apart, they were philosophers of cinema.

By
A.O. SCOTT

Jacques Rivette in Paris in 1968.Credit
Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos

Jacques Rivette’s “Out 1” — a 12-hour film, completed in 1971 and all but impossible to see in its entirety until very recently — begins with an extended sequence that combines artlessness and high artifice. The members of an experimental theater troupe (one of two such entities in the film) participate in an exercise that consists of writhing and squirming on the floor while wordlessly moaning and keening. It’s the primordial soup from which the film’s elaborate and elusive narrative will evolve, a reminder that every story begins in chaos and noise. Cinema, like other art forms, imposes a capricious kind of order on the mess of human experience, and “Out 1” illustrates this principle with a characteristically Rivetteian blend of intellectual rigor and anarchic whimsy.

Michel Butor

A pioneer of the French new novel, he wrote in just about every genre.

By
LYDIA DAVIS

Michel Butor in Paris, 1964.Credit
AFP/Getty Images

When you hear that a writer you first came to know in your youth is still writing in his advanced old age, you are at first surprised, as though he has risen from the tomb to write the poem you are reading. Then, once you absorb this fact, you go on to believe, quite illogically, that he will not die after all — certainly not soon.

Coca Crystal

An idiosyncratic host who brought surrealism to public-access TV.

By
SAM DOLNICK

Coca Crystal in her New York City apartment in 1970.Credit
Joe Stevens

For nearly 20 years, Coca Crystal’s weekly public-access show began with her smoking a joint. The show’s title was a scrap of messy poetry, as unwieldy as the program itself: “If I Can’t Dance, You Can Keep Your Revolution.” It was a no-fi interview show featuring scribbled title cards and minor downtown celebrities; regular guests included a singing dog and a disheveled poet who recited his work in a tapioca-thick mumble. She dedicated one episode to “the second anniversary of the first nonstop balloon crossing of North America.” The show isn’t easy to characterize, but Crystal probably described it best: “an hour of talk, telephone and technical failure.” Every episode ended with her dancing to groovy music — a little shoulder sway, some finger snaps.

Pat Summitt

She made her statement about the power of women by relentlessly pursuing every victory.

By
ELIZABETH WEIL

Pat Summitt huddling with players during a game in 1978.Credit
Lane Stewart/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images

During a Final Four basketball game against the University of North Carolina, on April 1, 2007, Pat Summitt, the coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team, found her team down by 12 points with 8:18 to go. She was fuming — her gold rings were dented from being banged on the parquet floor. Summitt was a screamer. She loved to win. Over 38 years at Tennessee, she won 1,098 games — more than any other coach in N.C.A.A. Division 1 history. She also understood winning as a far more potent and radical act than even the most rabid male football fans would understand while pounding their painted chests.